


June Ghosts

by ColonelDespard



Category: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: 6 June 1832, Afterlife, Ghosts, Supernatural - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 02:23:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4083052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColonelDespard/pseuds/ColonelDespard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the barricades fall, Grantaire finds that death cannot extinguish all things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	June Ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Story completed for a fic exchange, based on an "Enjolras/Grantaire: Afterlife" prompt. First published on LJ and FFNET.

Grantaire wasn't so much surprised by the form his afterlife took as much as he was by the fact that there was an afterlife at all.

As a child, forced to sit through Mass, he’d sought relief from the tedium in his surroundings. When not distracted by the stained glass windows and their procession of saints and angels, or gawping up at the ceiling bosses until he received a sharp pinch from his mother to bring his attention back to the priest, he had been fascinated by a winding staircase glimpsed behind a heavily embroidered curtain on the side of one of the transepts. He'd imagined that was the priest's secret passage to God, a means by which he could directly communicate with the Almighty. The idea was heavy with incense and mystery, and it seemed to him to embody the Church and its sanctified secrets.

Finding the door to the church unlocked one day and the woman who cleaned the church not in evidence, he'd crept behind the curtain. Holding his breath, he'd made his way up the narrow stone stair, expecting it to wind on and on. Instead he found himself, surprisingly quickly, in a small room that bore a resemblance to nothing so much as one of the attics in his home, a dusty storage area.

It seemed the best metaphor for the entire religious experience. Grantaire, when he died, had fully expected to go to exactly the same place a candle flame went when it winked out.

But Enjolras – well, Enjolras was different. Never mind that Enjolras eschewed formal religion, he was the stuff of which Catholic imagery was made of…a strange amalgam of Christ in the Temple and St Michael with his flaming sword. Grantaire’s own end he could care less about, but Enjolras' end he could not even imagine. Not even when he'd woken in the top room of the Corinthe and looked across to see his idol in torn and bloody clothes, defiantly facing down a firing squad.

There had been a moment of sublime joy and peace and completion when Enjolras had taken his hand with a smile. He hadn't even heard the report of the guns, his eyes caught in those of a man who, in the end, was his friend. His awareness had shrunk to that slow, all-encompassing smile and the pressure of the hand that held his own.

He would have been content to leave it there, but…well…here they were.

It was hard to explain, and even harder to puzzle out. He wondered sometimes if Enjolras knew more than he expressed, or if he, too, didn't understand. One moment they'd been hand in hand before the guns, and then the next – this most unexpected sequel. He supposed it was a heaven of a sort, but not many doctrines suggested paradise would consist of coming back to awareness, sitting on the hill of Montmarte, looking down at the city where they could still see rising smoke, and Enjolras silent and thoughtful beside him.

They'd ascertained a few things very quickly, walking the streets, discovering the limits of their interactions with others. Virtually all-encompassing limitations, so it seemed – they could neither be seen or touched, nor could they touch others. They could move from place to place with the ease of thought, if they concentrated. There were large periods of time in which they seemed to cease to exist, or be, and then there they were again, together, and moving through their city. It was a dreamlike existence, and yet it had the sharpness of reality. Described to him thus, he'd have thought it a waking nightmare. In living it – or existing in it, rather – it had its own peace and acceptance.

Of the other Amis, there was not a sign.

Enjolras seemed calmer with this entire scenario than Grantaire could have imagined. This passivity for a man who was, even at his most self-contained, the most forceful being Grantaire had ever encountered should have been a sort of ghastly hell, but as it was it seemed to be a tolerable purgatory. He still had Grantaire to talk with, and that worked out quite well. Much of that terrible dance they'd been locked in during their lives – or rather, that Grantaire was locked into – might have been eased if they could have talked. If he could have reigned in his excesses and not only curbed his cynicism, but the self-hate that had nurtured it.

Still, purgatory seemed as good an explanation as any, as they had encountered neither choirs of angels nor the white light of Enjolras' Supreme Being. But still Enjolras sought a purpose and a reason. He had died with the light of martyrdom in his eyes, as had his friends, but now here he was. And those lost friends were, apparently, nowhere.

"Perhaps we are ghosts," he said to Grantaire quietly as they observed a world that bustled on with activity and indifference, oblivious to the dead of June. "Combeferre himself refused to reject them and their possibilities. Some would have it that's what ghosts are – souls in purgatory. While this land holds their graves, France unfree will never be at peace."

"And yet, of all the Amis, you were the one who always had half a foot in the other world." Grantaire spoke without mockery or irony. "So why are they gone, and you still here?"

"I do not know. But here we are, until we must learn or do what it is that we must, so that we too may have our peace."

"I think you have earned your peace already."

"You, too. But here we are." Enjolras clasped his hand again, and to his relief Grantaire could feel the touch. At least that much was real.

But France, unfree, continued. In 1834, the ghosts of June rose again on the scene of rue Transnonain massacre. They found themselves there, in one of those strange, drifting shifts of scenery. Forced to walk unheard and unseen amidst the bodies.

And again, and again, and still Enjolras did not despair. His anger at oppression remained coupled to steely resolve and conviction. "It will come," he said, amidst the rubble of another street rising. "There will always be those who stand ready to commit a bolder deed, and yet another, until we are free."

But there were times when they trod familiar streets, and Grantaire knew that both missed their vanished friends terribly. Where had they gone, those lost boys? If Grantaire and Enjolras still trod the earth, what heaven could hold Courfeyrac? Courfeyrac – what part did he have in an unearthly paradise, being so utterly warm and earthy? What charms could a heaven hold compared to what he had loved in this world? And Combeferre…how could Combeferre be separate from Enjolras, even in death? Enjolras had told Grantaire of each of their deaths, and Grantaire, loving him so, loving them, could see that each was a laceration on his soul.

In February 1848 the people rose. Grantaire saw Enjolras atop a barricade, his hair seeming to be one with the winter sun, his eyes blending with the winter sky, and he feared for a moment that even in death he would lose him, consumed like a flame burning high with the revolution that swept the city. But Enjolras turned his blazing eyes on Grantaire, and never again would Grantaire doubt that wherever they went, they were going together.

Then came the bloody June days, and he thought that these, at last, would break Enjolras' heart. If not that, then surely the Second Empire that toppled the Second Republic. But still Enjolras held fast to hope. "If not now, then another century." They still walked the streets, once again barred with the barricades of a desperate people, to see hundreds done to death by the men of the General Magnan and Police Prefect Maupas, tools of the coup. 

He witnessed a remarkable scene at one of the barricades in Saint-Antoine. Enjolras, his face shadowed, had been gazing down at a young man who wore the bloodied smock of a worker. Grantaire knew that he was seeing the face of another young workingman who had fought on another barricade in this crushed and huddled form before them. Even the red hair was the same as that of a man who had cried out for the universal rights of men and who had sought to educate himself, who had spoken passionately about the crimes against subjugated peoples in other nations, and who was long dead and possibly forgotten by every living being…but never by the ghost who now leaned over this other broken form.

Then, to the surprise of both, the man opened eyes that were already unfocused with the approach of death, and looked directly at Enjolras.

"An angel…" he breathed.

Enjolras hesitated – even in these circumstances, his honesty prohibited a lie. So Grantaire, who had no such compunctions, intervened.

"Yes, an angel, come to see you home."

Enjolras knelt beside the boy and put his hand on his brow.

"Be at peace. You have done valiantly and well."

He died smiling.

Grantaire waited, wondering what he would see. In all the death they had witnessed, he had seen no souls that lingered as they did. The dead simply winked out of existence – or, if they continued, did so invisible to the two of them. In this case it was no different. One moment there, the next, gone. No vapour, no puff of air, as the spirit passed.

There was more and worse to come. The Siege of Paris, when they saw their beautiful city survive with her spirit just barely intact, Napoleon le Petit, as Hugo had called him, having brought them into a humiliating war with Prussia. The Paris Commune, when Enjolras finally howled his grief and rage as thousands were rounded up and executed in the wake of the fall, his fury such that Grantaire was sure it must break through the glass wall that separated them from the living, and that he would wreak some diving retribution on those who lined up the Communards and gunned them down by firing squads in an echo of their own deaths, writ large, and repeated over and over until Grantaire would have done anything to silence or flee from the guns. But Enjolras would not go, and he would not leave Enjolras. He was glad then that he could hold Enjolras – hold him as he screamed his transcendent anger at the wholesale slaughter of Frenchmen and women by their own government. Grantaire had learned silence in the sober years since his death, not even trying to diminish by words the enormity of what they had witnessed.

And then, for a while, they drifted. Sometimes Grantaire thought they would simply fade out of existence altogether. Perhaps that was what ghosts did. If they didn't achieve the resolution that freed them from their earthbound existence, perhaps they just finally dissipated with time, like morning mists as the day came. How many Ancient Romans still roamed the aqueducts and roads, after all? How many Bronze Age warriors? But sometimes they were still more present than at others, more aware of the world of the living, as the Third Republic lived out the dying days of the 19th Century and into the 20th. The Belle Époque blazed into life around them, but Enjolras was still more consumed with the injustices of the Dreyfus affair and the corruption that stained the Republic's name. And then came the conflagration of the First World War, and the horror of shells falling in the middle of Paris. They saw the weary troops with their tales of mud and the muddle of incompetent leadership on the Western Front and a nation driven near exhaustion.  
And then there was Hitler.

Not since the fall of the Paris Commune had he seen the mask of Enjolras' stoicism slip so far. He watched in grief as Paris fell, as the Vichy government betrayed their own people, as French Police rounded up French Jews and sent them to their deaths, and as their people clung desperately to the memory and hope of freedom.

But Enjolras would not turn his head away, and witnessed it all, with Grantaire at his side. More than ever, he embodied the spirit of his people, of the freedom they had fought so long and hard for.

"For all their faults," Enjolras explained as they stood outside a dingy café, listening as its patrons sang the Marseilles in defiance of the invader and his lethal hand, "and all their mistakes – the wrong paths taken, the waste, the blood and groping in the dark – no one has fought harder for their freedom than the French. And through that struggle I hope we may be a light to others in the world who share our belief in the ultimate freedom and elevation of the human race. This century is not the happy one I thought it would be, Grantaire, but through all these years I have learned that humanity will survive, and - not content to merely survive - we will always strive to be free."

Grantaire found himself believing every word.

On the 21 October, 1945 they joined the milling throngs on the Champs d'Elysee, celebrating the Elections for the Constituant Assembly that was to draft the constitution for the Fourth Republic. There was a sense of change in the air, a desire to renew the Republic. For the first time, suffrage had been extended to women.

"Combeferre would have been proud," Grantaire said, eyeing a group of women who waved tricolours and sang the Marseilles in a joyous triumph that could not have been more different from the furtive defiance of the café goers more than two years before. "Is this it, do you think? Will this Fourth Republic be any more enduring than the others? Or are we due for an Empire again? I lose track."

He would never quite get used to crowds – not to the feel of people who walked right through you. Even after all this time, he still moved out of the way of those who crossed his path. Enjolras, however, didn't care overly much and did not bother getting out of the way of those who could not see or feel them, and so he was often occupying the same space. To Grantaire's relief, they moved away slightly from the dense crowd – it was very disconcerting to be talking with Enjolras while someone's right arm extended from his torso, waving a small flag.

"I hope it will endure, but they must honestly address the beliefs that are central to those ideals that we fought for. There are so many matters that need attention – how can it be that Algiers is still occupied? We opposed it when Charles X annexed it to further his empire building ambitions, and yet it remains a French colony now, more than a century along."

"But still you have hope?"

"Always." And he smiled that same warm, encompassing smile that he had given Grantaire on June 6, 1832.

"There you are – at last!" The voice, with its laughing lilt, came from behind them. Even before he turned to it, Grantaire was aware of recognition – he knew it…knew that voice, though it came from a long, long time ago. He turned to see several figures emerging from the crowd. The man who had spoken had curling chestnut hair, a broad smile and green eyes that danced with humour and warmth.

Courfeyrac.

"Couldn't leave while the task was unfinished, could you?" Combeferre said…Combeferre with his gentle humour and kind expression, looking at them with a happiness that he could hardly contain.

"My friends," was all Enjolras could manage.

And then they were around Enjolras and Grantaire – Combeferre, Courfeyrac, Prouvaire, Feuilly, Joly, Bossuet and Bahorel. Young, whole, and full of life and joy. So much themselves that it almost hurt, as if the feeling that swelled up in his chest was too much to contain and must overthrow him. They were embracing with all the effervescent spirit that he remembered – the liveliness that he had never believed even death could extinguish.

"You have been a long time lingering here", Combeferre continued. "But it is time now, my dear friends, to go. We've waited long enough."

"The French Republic can get along without you looking over it," Courfeyrac laughed. “The journey goes on, but your part in it is done.”

And Enjolras turned and held a hand out to Grantaire, as he had once before.

"Shall we go then?"

Grantaire took his hand, said lightly "seeing as you permit it…"

And Enjolras, still smiling, surrounded by their friends who embraced them warmly, pulled him forward into eternity.


End file.
